


But Three Summer Days

by cognomen



Series: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: 15 years later, M/M, Post Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 12:15:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2467925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a repetitive verse, slow to build. Basch is glad the wall is rough. He finds holds for each hand, then pulls himself up on them and finds holds for his feet. The process repeats. </p><p>Once, as a boy, someone had told him the Viera had poems and songs that were dedicated to the <i>sound</i> of a place - some secluded corner of their wood. They could only perform these songs in a group, with each repeating the same line on a known interval, creating in verse an echoing sound, a slice of the wood in miniature to all that closed their eyes, wherever the group could stand.</p><p>He had never found a chance to ask Fran if it was true. He supposes it doesn't matter, he only thinks of it as an allegory for his climb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Three Summer Days

There are many who would charge Basch with a certain lack of poetry. He would grant them that, he had always been too slow a thinker and too fast a mover for poetry proper. He could listen and understand it, but never thought to compose for himself.

Yet even Basch's deliberate, ungraceful mind can find the poetry in this, scaling a wall to find a man who had climbed down one to avoid being found. 

It is a repetitive verse, slow to build. Basch is glad the wall is rough. He finds holds for each hand, then pulls himself up on them and finds holds for his feet. The process repeats. 

Once, as a boy, someone had told him the Viera had poems and songs that were dedicated to the _sound_ of a place - some secluded corner of their wood. They could only perform these songs in a group, with each repeating the same line on a known interval, creating in verse an echoing sound, a slice of the wood in miniature to all that closed their eyes, wherever the group could stand.

He had never found a chance to ask Fran if it was true. He supposes it doesn't matter, he only thinks of it as an allegory for his climb.

He knows Balthier's window is the third down from the top. Knows too, that it will be open. Balthier never shut himself into a place, not even now that hew as more law than outlaw. He does no know if he will find Balthier in occupancy, however. 

He supposes it doesn't matter, though some of the effect will be lost if Balthier does not witness his method of admission. The poetry of it will be in Basch's heart, at least.

He gains the sill, hooking a hand over and feeling triumph. Basch was too old for this by far, and at times made to feel old even for such work as Emperor Larsa still allowed of him.

He can feel the tired taxation of his muscles when Basch pulls himself up over the edge, feeling relief when it takes his weight. Basch takes a deep breath as his first step toward catching it.

When he looks up he finds that Balthier _is_ in - caught in situ, and startled into immobility. 

He is reclined, leaning back with a book spread open and willing in his lap, a pen held suspended in his fingers over the pages.

His eyes are trained on Basch, who makes his best attempt at a roguish smile. A pride that he is at least ten years too old for wakes in him, the satisfaction of a ripe plan well-fruited.

He sees why Balthier so enjoys it.

"Good morning," Basch says, though he is no longer certain that is accurate.

Balthier does not get up, instead keeping his gaze fixed on Basch until it tames down into a blandness that is the result of his excellent control, now that his initial shock has faded. Basch has often been the recipient of such, but to see the transformation again behind the magnifying glasses perched on Balthier's nose is familiar enough to warm him.

"An excellent morning to use the door, Captain," Balthier offers, reaching up to claim the glasses off of his nose to fold and put aside. "From what are you running, to make so dramatic an entrance?'

Basch rearranges himself slowly, until he is sitting on the sill more than laying upon it. The window is high enough that his feet hang in the air, leaving a strange echo of youth.

"I am not running _from_ anything," Basch answers at last, holding his unkind quip that it was Balthier's method to his silent self.

" _To_ what, then," Balthier's voice muses loftily, though the answer is apparent. "Or to _whom_?"

Basch laughs.

"I climbed all the way up your wall and you must ask me who I am here for? Balthier, recall to me your sharp wits and the expert barbs you carve with your tongue."

"Captain," Balthier says, his composure slipping for a minute into pleasure - for all his bland fussiness, he _was_ glad to see Basch. "Why is a Judge Magister climbing into Bhujerban windows? Could this not threaten your delicate peace?"

"I have not come as a Judge," Basch observes - nor would he have much liked to. The memory here was too strong of Archadian cruelty, though as the vise of control had eased, so had men's feelings toward Archades. At Larsa's side, as Gabranth, he would have been tolerated. Otherwise, Gabranth was still too tied to the old Solidor ways.

"Your clanking armor would have more quickly alerted me to your proximal presence, I suppose," Balthier allows. Curiosity sparks up then, a living light in the pirate's eyes. It is familiar - and brings a soft relief to Basch to see it.

Balthier had grown older while he was a 'ghost or unavailable' as he had put it. Not just in form, but in heart and attitude and eyes. Basch remembers the injury to his leg, though all seems mended now. The greater cut to Balthier had been the slow terror of his own transformation, a trade from invincible immortality to only the short reins of human fate.

"Will you not ask?" Basch goads, a very gentle pricking.

" _Why_ , Captain, are you here?" Balthier asks, wry and exasperated. Amused in spite of himself. 

"To accept your offer," Basch says, easing himself onto his feet.

"My...?" Balthier's mouth starts too quickly for his thoughts, but Basch hears the hesitation before Balthier continues. He knows it is the memory of his offer, given genuinely in a moment of true need. Balthier decides on deliberate ignorance, instead of acknowledging the weakness. 

"Offer?" He finishes, twisting the word into a question.

There was a time, between them, when Basch had moved with confidence. The instinct had been there in him to know when to push and how. Moments, even as delicate as this, had not daunted him.

They have both changed in the years, and now there was no reassurance that circumstances of fate would keep them together for apologies to be formulated, made, and accepted, past any mis-steps. Instead, it seemed ready to drive a widening spike in, as one might to split a strong log. Basch finds himself hesitating, uncertain where to put the weight of his effort.

Balthier gets to his feet at last. He stands confidently on his own, easy and steady. He tucks the quill into the book he had been keeping, and sets it aside.

"How is your leg?" Basch asks instead, finding his courage wavering.

"As right as your arm must be," Balthier answers, drily. He seems to sense the danger in quiet, the looming possibility for a change.

They should, as adults, discuss it.

They do not. 

Instead, Balthier lifts his hand and beckons leisurely to Basch, compelling him closer without a second thought. He goes, reaches to touch,a nd finds elegant, ringed fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. 

"Hardly a disguise, such fine fabrics," the pirate muses. "Save for the scar, you might be a nobleman." 

Basch curls his hands at Balthier's elbows, feeling the bony points of them against his palms. 

"Though 'tis a fine disguise for scaling walls in Bhujerba," Balthier continues thoughtfully, pulling on his holds in Basch's shirt. "You might be any married man wooing his true paramour." 

Their mouths are very close together now, Balthier's old tactic of distraction prior to disentanglement.

Well, Basch allows, not before a certain amount of _entanglement_.

"Well now, will you confess for me?" the words are teasing, in their shared breath. "Pronounce that you are forever mine?"

Basch kisses him, because he knows what he is about to say may rob him of a later opportunity.

"And if I did?" he breathes when they draw back, closing his eyes to the reaction.

"Don't," Balthier's voice is breathless, soft and lacking his usual acidity.

"But if I did?" Basch pushes. He has come to push.

Balthier shoves him back a step, and Basch must open his eyes at last and face him truly. Balthier's mouth is even, his face smooth, but there is a war in his eyes.

"Don't." 

Basch gathers breath - to argue, to ask why - he is not wholly sure.

"If you say one more word, Captain," Balthier warns, his tone a low and dangerous sound. "Then you had best be as good at descending from windows as climbing up to them." 

He had been baited into this conversation he realizes, though if Balthier only meant to reject him he is uncertain why he had been led. Left spinning, as often the case was between them, Basch goes quiet as he has been commanded.

"Was that a threat?" he asks at last, finding he cannot help his nervous smile.

Balthier sighs and pulls Basch close again. In his mind, the topic is closed. In Basch's, merely shelved for a moment when Balthier was more pliant. 

Basch counts himself lucky that Balthier is the sort to volunteer himself into such a state. Not only for his chance to plead his case, he supposes.

"Well," Balthier allows, toying with the fancy ties on Basch's shirt, tugging until the string criss-crossed through the eyelets at the neck comes entirely free into his hands, "such a display of prowess deserves a suitable display of appreciation, I should say."

Basch cannot help his laugh. Even with his muscles sore from climbing as he pulls his shirt over his own head, he feels younger. Perhaps as young as when they had met.

Balthier slides his hands over Basch's bared chest, appreciatively, fingers tangling in the grey chest hair that seems to amuse him so. Basch braces himself to lose another, but Balthier refrains.

"What would you define as suitable?" Basch asks, taking Balthier's shirt in turn, playing along with the pleasurable ploy for his own distraction.

"Wait and see, Captain," Balthier suggests, tone imperious to the point of command. "Lay back on the chaise."

He indicates the low couch on which he had been reclining, and Basch gives it a skeptical glance. It had been long enough for Balthier to stretch his legs out onto, but it was hardly going to accommodate Basch laying at full length.

"Do you not have a bed?" Basch asks.

"The chaise," Balthier commands, "if you please."

Basch finds it just long enough to support his back, shoulders through knees. The rest of him hangs off, ungainly, so Basch rests his feet on the floor and lifts his arms over his head to drape them over the armrest.

"Exactly so," Balthier praises, running his eyes hungrily over the presented picture. Basch is not certain - and never has been - what possible appeal he has for someone like Balthier. He had grown up as aristocratic and still held his fussy, peculiar taste. None of that seemed to align.

He claims Basch's pants, and then moves to draw the curtains over the window closed, slimming the light to an uneven sliver that falls across the floor and over Basch's belly. Balthier's eyes narrow slightly, and Basch knows he is considering re-aligning the light to fall instead over Basch's hips, to illuminate his cock.

"Don't you dare," Basch tells him.

"Ah but the proper lighting-"

"You have seen me in all stages of dress and every mode of light from the brilliance of desert sun to the full dark of deepest dungeon," Basch reminds, extending his hand to call Balthier closer. 

Balthier obliges, leaving the curtains behind to see to his own pants.

Basch holds his gaze carefully away from the wide swath of scars. He has his own field of them on his back, old and faded with time, yet still knotted into his skin. Some, he realizes, are not so old as Balthier's. Time has continued to give them to Basch.

"You have no sense of poetry," Balthier accuses, settling over Basch's hips on the narrow chaise.

He seems perplexed by Basch's laughter, uncertain what to make of such sudden, intense mirth. He leans over Basch with good humor, however, arching himself along the man's body and reaching for Basch's hands.

By the time Basch realizes he has been tied at the wrists with the string from his own shirt, the deed is done. The knot is clever. Basch accepts the confinement, still smiling at his own irony. 

Balthier does not ask the source of his mirth, content perhaps to dismiss it as an inner joke.

"Well," Basch allows, quiet and careful, shifting his hips below Balthier's suggestively. "This is a fine reward."

Balthier arches his brows and grazes his nails over skin, starting beneath Basch's chin and following tendon and sinew over his chest.

"This captivity is far kinder than those you have endured," Balthier promises, his voice a low, husky purr that sends blood to fill Basch's cock before it has even been touched.

Years gone, and still his body remembered, as it had briefly in Arcades, when Larsa had assigned Balthier into Basch's captivity. Time, distance and uncertainty had not killed this thing that lived between them.

Balthier curls a confident hand around Basch's stiffening cock and helps him along to hardness with long strokes, leaning over him to watch the changes on Basch's features through heavy-lidded eyes. To hear the low sounds Basch makes in pleasure.

When Basch lifts his joined hands to reciprocate, Balthier pushes them back down, tutting. His gaze is suddenly wicked, with Basch laid out at his disposal. 

He shifts his weight forward, settling his knees just beneath Basch's bared armpits. It puts his hips high enough over Basch's chest that he gets the idea quickly when Balthier threads his fingers through Basch's hair and then closes them, yanking until Basch relents and opens his mouth for use.

Some reward.

Balthier slips just the tip of his cock between Basch's yielding lips with a blissful sigh. It is not an easy position, and Basch does not have his hands to steady Balthier, to guide him. He does the best he can with his tongue, with wide, welcoming strokes of it over the head of Balthier's cock until Balthier slides deeper in a long, languid motion that pins Basch's tongue flat.

With his eyes closed, Basch lets the experience transform into sensations. The sweet, sore ache of the pulling at his scalp. Balthier's slow, easy thrusts along the length of his tongue, stopping just short of asking too much.

"Captain," Balthier purrs without pausing. It's a warning, before Balthier asks for more, for Basch to take him deeper. 

It is a difficult angle, a raw one when he has to swallow or gag trying, and Basch is out of practice, but he manages.

"Your daring is unprecedented," Balthier purrs in an undertone, distracted enough for his thoughts to slip free. Basch keeps up his efforts, as Balthier's grip eases to softness in his hair. He wishes his own hands were free.

"Have you really come to be a pirate?" Balthier breathes, bending himself nearly in two to deliver the words closer to Basch' ear. 

"Are you capable of leaving behind rules and honor and such chances to take on-"

Balthier doesn't finish, instead lifting himself back up, rolling his hips in a languid motion that does not stop before Basch has to lift his tied hands and push Balthier back just enough so that he can swallow.

The emission is bitter and salt on his tongue, but familiar. He swallows because it is less mess and trouble than spitting, a soldier's practicality.

When Balthier has grown soft, when he sits back, glowing and damp with his own sweat, Basch wipes the excess of spit from his mouth and chin with his joined wrists, a victorious motion.

"I have come because you asked, Balthier," Basch answers, his voice rough. "Because you would not nave, if some part of you did not require it." 

He has mis-stepped.

Balthier's eyes turn sharp instead of their usual permissive haze when Basch has thus pleased him. He pushes Basch's tied hands back up over his head, easing back to sit over his belly with a sigh, a long hiss of air past his lips.

"Piracy, Captain," he says, shifting himself to press his ass suggestively over Basch's hips, as if to distract him from the entire concept even as he discussed it with more directness than he usually allowed. "Is about doing what _you_ want."

"And what about our shared situation implies I am in any way resistant?" Basch asks, tempering the damage done with care - for all of his conviction of freedom and callous, care-free nature, Balthier was difficult to pin with even the most cunning trap. There were rules with the pirate, rules within rules at times. Basch remembers some, but he had not learned them all when last they kept company - and perhaps he never would.

"Captain," Balthier sighs, reaching back to stroke strong, agile fingers over Basch's cock, distracting him. "You live for your debts and the burdens you take on. Are you coming to take on yet another series of sins to which you own no rights?" 

"Only my own," Basch assures. He arches into the touch. "The ones I left unfinished between the periods when my life was no longer my own." 

"Because I called you?"

Basch hesitates. He does not know what answer Balthier is fishing for, but he is certain, somehow, that there is a right one.

"Stop teasing," Basch commands instead, feeling the pleasurable build of release crawling down his spine and tightening in the pit of his stomach.

"Balthier," Basch says, swallowing and opting for a line of honesty through the course of toying and doublespeak that would gain him nothing but irritation and Balthier's ire. "If not now, how much longer must I chase you or endure remaining still - a rock standing still that you chart courses by but do not settle beside."

Balthier makes a displeased sound.

"We do not grow younger, but both run on as if time is endless."

"I go on as if there is no tomorrow," Balthier argues. 

"But if there is," Basch says, fingers finding a loose loop of knot and worrying at it.

"If there is, I intend to live as if there is none after," Balthier intones drily. 

"Then what harm to let me come along for today, if there's no tomorrow?" Basch asks, and finds his own smile is victorious when Balthier's angry scoff has no sharp retort to immediately follow it.

The string gives, sliding loose into Basch's fingers, and he lets it fall to the floor when he lifts his hands to settle them at Balthier's hips, lifting and standing - though it is awkward and his muscles are sore from his climb.

He pushes Balthier down onto his own chaise, settling over him.

"If it suits you better," Basch tells him, casting about in the depths of the cushions and beneath the chaise itself - Balthier's usual repositories for convenient slick - and going un-rewarded. "I could chase you to the ends of the earth and climb all the walls you set between us."

"That would put a certainty to the limit on your tomorrows," Balthier answers, but his tone is slightly softer.

"Are you so out of practice you no longer make allowances for when you return to them?" Basch asks, of another matter, giving up his search for lubricant as fruitless.

"My allowances are by the bed," Balthier smirks.

Basch draws a deep breath and lets it out as a long, half-amused sigh. 

"Will you direct me, pirate, or am I to discover on my own?" 

Balthier only smiles, cat-with-cream satisfied at diverting the conversation and inconveniencing Basch both.

"You are denying your own pleasure," Basch tells Balthier's widening, maddening grin.

Then, he hoists Balthier, yelping and stiff-limbed up over one shoulder, moving deeper within the presented lair. He may n ever mind a whole, permanent solution to what was between them, but ever in the past they had worked the best on shared intuition.

Fran barely twitches one her long, elegant ears as Basch carries his intended conquest past where she has settled with tea and maps to hand. Her sharp hearing and acute sense of smell had likely long since discerned Basch's presence and recent activities. Her other ear rotates slowly in a faint, conspiratorial indication of what Basch seeks, indicating an open doorway.

His presence, thus, is sanctioned though Balthier fusses louder for her lack of intervention on behalf of his dignity or honor. And though it may last three hours, three years, or but three days - Basch can embrace Balthier's notion of piracy as living for the moment, and accept his own notions of immediacy are a shade different while still aligning.

-

**Author's Note:**

> ... I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain...  
>  -John Keats, Excerpts from a letter to Fanny Brawne


End file.
